


The Father We Never Found

by Epigone



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-18
Updated: 2006-10-18
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Dean’s getting more and more like Dad, these days: he never answers.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Father We Never Found

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Spoilers up through 2x02, "Everybody Loves a Clown."  
>  **Notes and Acknowledgments** : A thousand thanks to mandysbitch, who was there in the wee hours to take on a nightmare of a dream sequence. A thousand more each to Damson and Hiyacynth, who told me when I was making sense and when I was just making stuff up. The title comes from the final paragraph of Jack Kerouac's _On the Road_ , which you can find [here](http://emptybottle.org/glass/2007/01/i_think_of_dean_moriarty.php). A couple lines of dialogue come from _Supernatural_ episodes, specifically "Shadow," "Faith," "Home," and (slightly altered) "Dead in the Water" and "In My Time of Dying." And a whole lot of inspiration comes from James Dickey's ["Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek."](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20381)
> 
> * * *

They can’t release Dad’s body, at least not right away. That’s what Dr. Robinson said as he ushered Sam and Dean down the hall, before he was called away on another code. Now they’re sequestered in the room where he left them, and the only people who’ve come by are nurses who can’t tell them anything, who offer them only condolences and coffee refills. Sam can’t drink his; he passes each cup over to Dean, who’s been steadily downing them like shots all morning.

In the afternoon, they finally get a guy in pristine whites who looks barely older than Dean. He introduces himself as Dr. Gillis, extends more condolences, and tells them they have some forms to go over, so they might as well take a load off. Sam’s already slumped in a chair, has been since they left Dad’s room, but Dean just keeps pacing in a tight circle, reading charts and notices tacked to the walls, not looking at either of them.

“Please,” says Gillis, wasting a cordial smile on Dean’s back, “have a seat.”

“He’s fine,” says Sam. Gillis looks at him inquiringly, but doesn’t pursue the matter. “Can we get our dad out of here now?”

Gillis smoothes the file in his hands. “Well, here’s the thing. Maybe Dr. Robinson mentioned this to you earlier, but there’s some procedure to go through before we can release the body. We have to notify the medical examiner, we have to get your consent for an autopsy—”

“We’d rather not have one,” says Sam.

“Well, that's your call, of course," says Gillis. "As far as we can tell, your father died of heart failure. But wouldn’t it be best to _know_?”

Sam breathes out once, for the first time in a while. “No,” he says. “Not really.” 

“Okay,” says Gillis, nonplussed but still pleasant. “See, this is why I need to talk to you two. Clear these things up.” He stares at Sam more closely, and Sam stares back. The guy’s floundering, clearly out of his depth. He does look Dean’s age. “We can do this another time, if you’d like.”

Dean finishes his latest circuit, about-faces with military precision at the door, and starts back. Sam follows with his eyes, but Dean doesn’t return the look.

“Let’s just cover everything now,” says Sam. “Whatever we have to do.”

He answers most of the questions without even having to think, all the facts he knows of Dad’s life a recitation so rote and impersonal it blends into the two-note rhythm of Dean’s footsteps. It’s only when Gillis leans forward a bit and asks, without warning, “Did your father see action?” that Sam hesitates, and hears Dean miss a beat too, as if they both suddenly blundered against something in the dark.

Gillis glances up and, seeing Sam’s blank expression, explains, “He had an old scar on his left thigh that looked like the kind of damage you get from a mortar fragment.”

Dean, unmoving, says to the wall, “He got a Purple Heart for it.” 

Sam doesn’t even bother looking this time; he knows Dean won’t respond. He swallows and nods confirmation. 

“Vietnam,” he says.

Gillis makes a notation and then asks, “Did he ever talk about it?”

“Every now and then. Stories about war buddies, crazy stunts they pulled on leave, that kind of thing.”

“About the fighting itself, though?” probes Gillis, pen raised. “About how he felt about it?”

“About—” The only reason Sam doesn’t laugh is he’s not sure it’ll come out as a laugh. “About how he _felt_? No.”

“Okay.” Gillis bobs his head up and down. “See, here’s the thing. The wound on his left leg, that’s pretty straightforward. But—” He pauses. “You really don’t want to do this later? We can’t release him today anyway; you could—”

“We want to do it,” says Sam. “All of it.” But the knot in his stomach has coiled tighter, and he can feel waves of some unnameable emotion radiating off Dean from across the room.

“All right, then,” says Gillis. “In the past couple of years there’ve been some studies done on the subject, and a lot of Gulf War and Vietnam veterans are turning up with self-inflicted injuries—”

Low and flat, Dean says, “I dunno what you’re gettin’ at, Doc. Like you said, it was a mortar fragment. And you can’t get a Purple Heart for, y’know.” His back is to them, but they can see him cross his arms over his chest. “Doin' it to yourself.”

“Self-inflicted injuries _after_ the war,” says Gillis quietly. “A lot of vets, especially those who were wounded in combat, come back and turn up with self-inflicted injuries years later. And a lot of them end up dying when they shouldn’t, when the injuries shouldn’t be fatal.” He clears his throat. “Your father also had a gunshot wound on his right leg—a fresh one, no more than a few days old, and one that was inflicted at close range. So, I’m sorry to have to ask this, but it’s—you know, given the circumstances—did you ever know him to suffer from PTSD or depression? Were there ever any—”

And then Dean’s saying, in a loud, level voice, “Fuck. You,” and his coffee cup’s exploding against the floor, and Sam’s rising from his chair to intercept Dean in case he does something stupid. But by the time Sam’s on his feet, Dean’s already stopped. Stopped halfway there, staring at the coffee stain trickling along the grout of the gleaming tile, the Styrofoam cup rolling to a stop against Sam’s chair leg. Sam looks down at it and feels his stomach curl, like he’s going to lose it, but then he looks back at Dean. There’s absolutely nothing in his face. He’s just insensible mass, just a body halted by a terminal blow, and Sam’s seen enough of that for one day. 

So he doesn’t lose it; he goes over to Dean, takes him by the arm, and says, “Okay, time to go.”

Gillis is a little white around the lips, but he recovers enough to say, “You’re right, I think we’re done for now.”

“When’s _he_ done?” asks Sam, jerking his head sideways toward the hall.

Patiently, Gillis says, “It’s going to take us some time to process everything. Why don’t you guys go home and get some sleep in the meantime, come back tomorrow morning?”

Sam expects Dean to suggest where Gillis ought to go, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s gone away again, leaving Sam with the weight of his arm, the responsibility of getting him discharged, and all the hours to come.

***

As a kid, Dean used to love horror movies. On nights when Dad was out late, Dean always had dibs on the remote control, and invariably, even if the motel only offered half a dozen channels, he’d manage to find something gory. Not to scare Sam—after all, by the time he was six Sam had already seen worse in real life—but to pick it apart with patronizing glee. He loved the factual errors, the logical inconsistencies; he loved how stupid all the characters were, how it took them the whole two hours to get wise to what was happening.

As he grew up, he seemed to lose interest, and he’d make a point of surfing past _Carrie_ or _The Exorcist_ whenever they were on. Maybe after a while, the same old stupid mistakes stopped being funny. Maybe after a while, the movies started being frightening in an unintentional way: as windows into a world without people like him, where amateurs died en masse for the sake of a senseless plot, where ghosts stuck to no particular pattern and laws of physics were flouted at will. Where the moral and aesthetic rules of his carefully constructed universe ceased to exist. _That_ , Sam always suspected, was the real horror.

So Sam’s surprised when he steps out of the shower that evening and vaguely recognizes the movie playing on the TV. Dean’s sitting on the floor just beneath it, knees to his chest, back propped against the far bed, with a pair of headphones plugged into the set—weirdly polite of him to worry about the noise. He hasn’t moved much since they checked into this dingy motel, the only one the cab driver could recommend that was cheap enough and close enough to the hospital.

Sam goes and sits on the edge of the bed. On an impulse, he reaches out and touches Dean on one knee—ostensibly to announce his presence, since Dean’s wearing that stuporous look again, but really just to prove they’re both here. Dean doesn’t respond. Normally Sam would have resisted that kind of impulse, but then normally Dean would have responded to something this mushy with sarcasm or bodily harm. Neither of them feels normal tonight. Which is weird, because nothing is more normal than sitting in a motel room waiting for their father.

“Whaddaya watchin’?” Sam asks, glancing at the screen, where a seriously ornery-looking cat just became road kill.

“ _Pet Sematary_ ,” replies Dean. After a moment his eyes slide up to Sam, then back to the TV. “You’ve seen it before.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, his mind brushing against the memory. “So’ve you.”

Dean shrugs. “Nothin’ else on.”

“I thought horror movies were stupid,” says Sam, taking his hand away. He doesn’t know why—he hasn’t been scared by one of these things since he was old enough to talk—but the hairs on his forearms are standing on end. He tries to remember the last time he saw this.

“They are,” says Dean, and then, with more life in his voice than there’s been all day: “Man, I could give you a long _list_ of what’s stupid in this freakin’ thing. I mean, okay, the basic plot. This guy buries all the bodies in the cemetery and somehow their spirits are just, like, hangin' out waiting to jump back in? Think about it—it doesn’t _work_ , right?”

Sam draws his legs up under him on the bed. He watches the protagonist, this family-man doctor, carrying the cat’s lumpy, fake-looking corpse into the woods. Somehow the whole thing seems ten times creepier when there’s no sound.

“I actually wasn’t thinking that hard about it,” he says. He knows it’s stupid, but now he can feel the back of his neck prickling, too. “Were you?”

Dean turns and stares at him, and Sam doesn’t know why it bothers him so much. Sure, Dean’s never been this frozen for such a long stretch, but it’s not like the expression is unfamiliar. Almost as far back as Sam can remember, Dean’s had a habit of turning blank every now and then, of going flat and flaccid in the face as if the muscles have stopped functioning—as if the dead in this job have rubbed off on him. Dad used to get it too, the famous soldierly thousand-mile stare. 

For his part, Sam hasn’t looked in the mirror much, this past year. Afraid maybe he’ll see the glacier creeping down his own face.

“Dude,” says Dean, at length, “chill out. It’s just a movie.” But for the remaining hour he stays motionless and intent, plugged into the silent screen until the credits roll.

***

Sam dreams, and for once it’s not a premonition. Just a half-waking memory, a case he hasn’t thought about in years.

He and Dean, eight and twelve, are looking for a cursed object (a necklace? who can remember these things?) in a backyard orchard gone to weeds somewhere in rural Kentucky. Sam can’t remember where Dad’s supposed to be, maybe searching the main house. Dean’s manning a metal detector lent to them by a local friend of Dad’s, skimming the wire coil over the dead leaves. His head is dwarfed by huge black earphones; suspended in the middle is his vacantly receptive face.

Dean loved that detector, Sam remembers. Afterward, in secret, he took it apart and put it back together easy as you please. Just wanted to see what was inside.

Two hours or more they spend out there, among the trees whittled to skeletons by insects and fungus, and Sam would be bored to death except every time he glances at Dean hunched over that detector, something in Sam’s chest winds tighter. They can’t find it, whatever it is they’re supposed to find, and any minute Dad will call from the house and they’ll have nothing to give him.

Sam looks to the horizon, where night is lapping up like a tide, and when he looks back down Dean’s wearing that same expression, that same blank, dumb straining of senses into the silence, awaiting the signal. Except the metal detector’s gone now, and clenched against one ear is a cell phone. Sam huddles closer—he’s taller than Dean now, has to bend slightly—to hear Dad’s disembodied voice tell them “I can’t be reached—”

“Dad,” Dean’s saying desperately, “if you get this, get to Chicago as soon as you can,” but there’s no response except a whirring noise, and a moment later the babble of themselves pouring out of the past, all their secret cut-off pleas spat back out at them—some of them messages Sam knows he’s never heard, should not be able to conjure, but it’s not like his dreams have ever played by the rules of time and space—

Sam, young and full of terrified bravado, in those early days at Stanford when he couldn’t sleep unless he lined his doorway with dining-hall salt, waking with the sun and calling every morning for two weeks; waiting for Dad to answer, waiting until he hit voicemail, another dead end, and finally hung up—

Dean in his first autumn alone, grit and worry thickening his voice, leaving message after message: “Just let me know what’s up, okay? I finished this voodoo deal weeks ago, I don’t know where you want me to go next—”

Sam again, alone in an echoing motel room, saying hoarsely, “You probably won’t even get this, but, uh, it’s Dean. He’s sick—”

The thin thread of Dean’s voice, back in Lawrence: “I don't know what to do. So whatever you're doin', if you could get here, please—I need your help, Dad—”

And then Dean, flushed, is cutting the call short. He deftly flips the phone over and begins slicing it open with a fingernail, a long smooth seam like a coroner’s incision, and when its insides are laid exposed before them, Dean holds it up and looks at Sam like the child he never was, all shock and wonder, and says, “There’s nothing there.”

They stand together in the rotted-out orchard, their two dark heads bent over the phone, waiting to pick up the signal again. Keep looking, keep looking. A little to the left, boys, warmer, warmer....

Which is when Sam realizes that maybe this is—was?—a premonition after all. That maybe all his twenty-three years have just been foreshadowing for the moment when he and Dean stood in the doorway to that hospital room, unbelieving prayers stopped on their lips, listening to the buzz of flatline like a phone off the hook, the void of voicemail: God isn’t available right now, please leave a message.

When the call comes it’s no answer at all. Just two numbers, another deferral. Your next destination: forty-three eighty-nine.

Time of death: ten forty-one.

***

In the morning there’s no Dean, just a note on the dresser that reads “Supplies.” Sam gets dressed and drags the desk chair out onto the motel landing. He sits there with his knees bunched up against the railing, his bare feet dangling, and watches the parking lot empty out. This is a real no-frills motel: people passing through looking for one-night stands, or a couple hours of sleep between this town and the next.

The first car to pull in is familiar. It’s one of Bobby’s.

Sam starts down the stairs to greet him, and when they meet in the middle they both stop. Bobby stands there with his feet on different steps, car keys in hand.

“Hey, Sam,” he says. “Your brother in?” And then, when Sam shakes his head: “Good.”

“Bobby,” says Sam, “Dad—”

“I know,” says Bobby. “Just came from the hospital. They told me where you were at.”

“Where were _you_?” asks Sam. He thinks about inviting Bobby in, or going down to the car with him, but he does neither. Just stands there stuck, halfway down the stairs, the soles of his feet aching against the cold concrete.

“Lincoln. Your daddy gave me a call real late, night before last, an’ asked me to go take care of his truck.” 

“Where is it now?” asks Sam, staring at him.

“If I don’t tell you, nobody can get it outta you.” Bobby gives a smile that isn’t a smile at all. “I hid it good. I think it needs to disappear for a while, till things calm down.” He throws the car keys to Sam, who catches them by reflex, the way he’s been doing everything. “I brought some stuff back in the trunk; you go look through it when you can.”

The keys are cold and heavy and separate in Sam’s hand, the touch of a dead man’s fingers. “Why?” he asks. “Why’d he need you to go that night?”

“Make sure the cops didn’t get hold of anything valuable.” Bobby shrugs, then sighs and leans over the railing, elbows spread. “And… to keep me outta the way. ’Cause he thought I’d figured out what he was up to.”

Sam rests his back against the motel wall and exhales.

“What, summoning the demon?” he asks.

Bobby seems to be staring at something far, far away. Sam follows his gaze, but all he can see are rooftops and streetlights, the black sinuous spine of the freeway.

After a while, Bobby says, “Yeah. Summoning the demon.”

“He said he wouldn’t,” Sam tells him. “He didn’t.”

“I’m real glad, son,” Bobby says. He looks like he wishes he were.

***

Bobby’s crashed in Dean’s bed all morning—a round-trip drive to Nebraska’ll do that to a man—and so there’s nothing to do but go down to the car. When Sam pops the trunk there’s not much inside, probably not really enough to justify sending Bobby all that way. A folder full of numbers, dates, and locations that mean nothing to Sam. A ring of keys to who knows what. A few boxes of ammo, the best of the hunting knives. Two cell phones: the one Dad used up until the end, and the one that Sam remembers from his pre-college days. He checks: the former says it has one saved message, the latter fourteen. He puts them in his pocket; they might be useful, but he has no idea what passwords Dad would’ve used.

He finds nothing else of interest, nothing personal at all. No pictures, no letter, no will. Sam doesn’t know why he’s surprised. It’s not like Dad went to Lincoln planning on dying.

Half an hour later Dean comes back, and Sam can see him when he’s still a ways off across the freeway, making his way through a strip-mall parking lot. Sam’s never seen him walk that way, with his shoulders so far forward, his strides so short. He looks smaller than he is, even when he gets up close. 

He’s carrying two bags, one from McDonald’s and one from the local Kroger supermarket. Expressionless, he asks, “We can take Bobby’s car?”

“Yeah, he’s gonna hop a bus home,” says Sam. “He was—” And he thinks of Bobby asking _Your brother in?_ , and for some reason he says, “He was back home working on the Impala.”

Dean nods and hands him the McDonald’s bag. Inside there’s a Big Mac, and Sam looks at it and thinks that maybe he’ll want it later. Say in a few years. He leans on the car and tries to focus.

“What’s in the other bag?” he asks.

“Lighter fluid,” says Dean.

***

Back at the hospital, they get Dr. Robinson again, who keeps trying to tell them about the official channels they can go through. Finally Sam holds up a hand and asks, “But we don’t _have_ to do all this, do we?” 

“No,” says Robinson, eminently reasonable, “state law provides for a lot of latitude, but—”

“Okay,” says Dean in a detached voice, as if he’s carrying on a conversation with someone else entirely, just out of sight. “All we wanna do is take our dad home.”

Robinson looks at him, then back at Sam. Sam almost feels sorry for the guy; he doesn’t know how to handle people who react to death outside the normal parameters. After Robinson pronounced it yesterday morning, Sam left him and Dean standing in the doorway, found a bathroom and sat in a stall just staring for five minutes; then went back to accompany Dean to the room down the hall. In Sam’s five minutes of absence, he has no idea what his brother said or did. Dean probably doesn’t either.

“I understand that,” says Robinson, “but you have to consider that handling a body on your own, without professional assistance, can be very stressful, and there’s all kinds of protocol that you’re probably not going to want to deal with at such a difficult time. Now, I can get you in touch with someone who can suggest some good”—he pauses, adds nonchalantly—“affordable funeral homes—”

Dean’s eyes shift to Sam, then away. Sam nods, clears his throat, and says, “I’m gonna go get some air.” He leaves Dean to feign attention to Robinson’s spiel.

They’ve had experience in wrangling bodies from hospitals before, so it doesn’t take Sam long to figure out the procedure. At Admitting he flashes his McGillicutty ID to the proper authorities, signs in, and fills out a Burial Transit Permit. A suited young attendant from Decedent Affairs takes him into the morgue and pulls out a shelf.

“Do you want a minute alone?” the attendant asks, with real concern in his hound-dog face. They must not release a lot of bodies to family members here.

Sam shakes his head. He doesn’t want to spend a single more minute alone than he has to.

It’s just a body bag, without markings or meaning, and it looks small on the stainless steel shelf. It’s heavy when they lift it onto a stretcher, but somehow not the heaviest load against which Sam’s ever strained himself. The material of the body bag isn’t as thick as he expected; he can feel too much through it.

They carry the stretcher out a side door and into the back parking lot, where Dean left Bobby’s car. There they pause and stare for a second.

“Trunk’s big enough?” asks the attendant in a low voice.

“Yeah,” says Sam. Dean measured.

“It’s—he’s gotta be transported on the stretcher,” the attendant explains as they lower both stretcher and bag into the trunk. Finished, he takes a step back and slams it shut. “And, uh… he has to be somewhere where you can’t see him from the outside.” He leans against the back of the car, breathing hard, and peers at Sam’s face. He winces. “I’m really sorry, man,” he says, and he goes.

Alone, Sam wanders off a few feet, squats in the scrubby field beside the parking lot, and throws up. He stays that way until the muscles in his legs start to spasm. Then he stands, swipes at his mouth, and goes to sit in the passenger seat until Dean comes.

“Okay?” asks Dean, climbing in, his eyes straying toward the rear of the car.

“Done,” says Sam. Dean nods and starts the engine. After a moment of raw silence, Sam asks, “How’d you shake Robinson?”

“Told him I thought I was gonna hurl; just walked out.” Judging from the set of Dean’s jaw, it probably wasn’t far from the truth. Sam’s laugh sticks in his throat, and Dean meets his eyes for the first time. “Oh, you look beautiful. Are _you_ gonna?”

“Already did,” says Sam.

“All right,” says Dean, and they roll out. Neither has to say anything; they both know they can’t go home just yet. Around dusk, a few hours outside civilization, Dean pulls over by the side of the road, and they follow the last procedure left to them.

***

It’s not quite dawn and Dean drives with one hand on the wheel, the other holding his cell phone as he talks to a representative at Lawrence Memorial Park Cemetery. Perfect conditions for a head-on collision, but Sam doesn’t say a thing. He just grips his armrest and starts humming under his breath.

Dean gets off the phone and snaps, “If that’s supposed to be Metallica, you can lay off. I don’t need calming down.”

Sam shoots him a sideways glance and has to agree. Dean doesn’t need to be any calmer. Dean already looks so calm he’s just this side of catatonic.

“Who says I was doing it for _you_?” Sam retorts. 

Dean doesn’t answer. Dean’s getting more and more like Dad, these days: he never answers.

They told Dr. Gillis that Dad never talked about the war, about what it felt like. That’s true. The only person who ever breathed a word about that to Sam was Caleb, one time in ’89 when John dropped the boys off for a week in Lincoln while he went after a particularly nasty witch outside Omaha. Late one night, Sam was hunkered down on the couch watching a history program on the TV, footage of rows and rows of flag-covered caskets stretching out across tarmac. He was so fascinated by the image—by all the pomp and circumstance the military afforded its dead, so much more involved than the usual salting and burning—that he didn’t notice he was being watched until Caleb cleared his throat from the doorway.

Sam looked up in mild interest, then back at the television. He didn’t have to worry that Caleb would play the bedtime card. Caleb was cool that way; he didn’t sweat the small stuff. Once he was a soldier in Dad’s platoon.

After a while, Sam asked, “Did you have friends who died like that in the war?” Caleb made a noise of assent, and so Sam ventured on into taboo territory. “Were you sad?”

Caleb came around and sat on the end of the couch. “Guess so,” he said slowly, watching the camera pan out over the dead. “Not as sad as I coulda been, though. The alternative was the guys who stayed MIA for years, running around out there in the bush or wherever they were. That was worse. Because those guys… you could never give up on ’em. It was almost better when they got sent back in boxes, because at least then you could stop looking.” 

They stayed up most of the night, watching the program in speechless solidarity. Around four a.m., Dean stuck his head down from the loft and said drowsily, “He shoulda been asleep ages ago, Caleb,” and they packed Sam off to bed.

Dean drives them along silently for a while, as the sun comes up among the pine trees and gleams gold on the dusty windshield. Sam finds he’s still gripping the armrest so hard it hurts. He lets go.

He thinks about telling Dean. Pointing to the back seat where the urn waits for the earth. Saying, At least we got to see this, Dean. Did you get to see _anything_ when Mom went? But Dean wouldn’t get it, wouldn’t know the story behind it. Dean was never that interested in listening to stories, unless they came from Dad.

“Hey,” Sam says, “I was thinking. Since Dad was a vet, technically he could have… you know, funeral honors. A military escort.” 

As soon as he says it he’s confused, doesn’t know why he brought it up. It’s not like he ever seriously considered the idea. What do any of them care about that kind of ceremony? Plus, there’d be about five thousand complications: having to go through a funeral home, all the unnecessary government entanglements, mountains of forms.

Dean keeps his eyes on the road. Without a flicker in his face, he says, “Yeah. ’Cause Dad was real keen on having company when he was alive.”

***

They stand at the headstone together, irresolute, as if they have something to wait for. Sam looks at the mound of freshly turned earth and wonders if this is how their mother’s grave looked all those years ago, but he doesn’t ask. 

Finally, Dean inclines his head toward the cemetery office adjoining the church, and says, “Someone oughta go in and make sure all the loose ends are tied up.” Sam nods, but doesn’t move. Dean digs his hands into his pockets and says, “I didn’t mean me.”

Sam sighs and asks, “Why not?”

Dean looks at him fiercely and says, “What if they… remember me, or something?”

“Remember you from _what_?” And then he gets it. “Oh, Dean, come on. No one’s gonna recognize you. You think you haven’t changed enough since you were _four_?” But Dean doesn’t say anything, and after a second Sam surrenders. “Fine, I’ll go. I’ll be back in a bit.”

He goes in, but of course all the arrangements were made in advance, so there’s nothing left for him to do. No doubt Dean wants his time alone at the grave, so Sam wanders out the side door that leads away from the cemetery, the one that faces west toward Lawrence proper. From the top of the hill on which the church sits, he can almost see the roof of their old house.

He lowers himself onto the narrow steps leading to the door, leans back against the stone wall, and closes his eyes. They really ought to get back to Bobby’s as soon as possible; with the demon likely to be on their trail, they can’t be safe here, in the town where it all started. For a moment his chest tightens, angry tears burn against his eyelids, and he thinks, What now, Dad? Where to next? What, no directions today? I’ve got some for you, Dad: undiscovered country, all that bullshit. You’re going somewhere nobody can follow. I guess that’s what you wanted, huh?

Then his eyes snap open. He stares into the distance, straining to see their roof, and he takes Dad’s two phones out of his pocket. The older one’s more promising, with its vast store of old voicemail messages, so that’s the one he turns on, the one into which he types a series of numbers: 38979523.

It begins replaying the messages for him. They’re all from the fall of 2003, and they’re all the same. A second of silence, two at the most, and then the click of a hang-up. Fourteen in total: two weeks of disconnected calls that Dad saved without apparent reason, on an outdated phone itself saved for no apparent reason. Sam doesn’t need to check the number from which they came. He sits on the steps with the phone in the crook of his shoulder, his arms wrapped around his legs, and for a long time only the slight hitches in his breathing, like the sound of all those hang-ups, remind him he’s still alive.

“Shit,” he says when it finishes. “Shit, Dad.” You could’ve picked up, he almost says, but there were a lot of things Dad could’ve done differently, and they wouldn’t all have been better. 

After a while, he looks back down at the phone, where the password still glares up at him. 38979523. 38.97, 95.23: Lawrence, Kansas.

“Okay,” he says to it. No undiscovered countries for you. Fair’s fair. You spent your life discovering this one from end to end; it’s enough. You can stop. You can stay here.

He wipes his face, pockets the phones again, and goes back to the cemetery. Dean’s not there, which scares him for a split second, but then he looks toward the road and he can see Dean in Bobby’s car, sitting in the passenger seat. He makes his way down and climbs in.

“Done?” he asks, cautious.

Dean’s smile is bitter. “Done? Yeah, sure.”

“What?” Sam asks. “What’d I do?”

“Nothing,” says Dean, and if there were anything at all Sam could do to make Dean stop saying that word, he’d do it. “I was just trying to remember—who was it who once said people only disappear if other people stop looking for them?”

Sam puts his hands on the steering wheel and leans forward.

“Look,” he says, “we’ve gotta—we’ve gotta get back to Bobby’s, you know? There’s a lot to do.”

“Really? I don’t think so.”

“Dean,” says Sam, hearing the strain in his voice, “man, sometimes you stop looking _because_ they disappear, you know? I mean, what the hell would you suggest at this point? Necromancy?”

There’s a flash in Dean’s eyes like a wince. “Don’t, Sammy.”

Sam wishes Dean would wince with his whole face, wishes his face would do anything at all. Dean’s been shocked in and out of life so many times, it doesn’t seem fair to just leave him here, stuck in the middle. And it occurs to Sam how strange all of this is, that it’s Dean the eternal mover immobilized now, and Dad slipped into his final stillness in the town where he first made a home; and he, Sam, the one who’s always wanted to settle down, is sitting in the driver’s seat of Bobby’s beat-up old car.

Dean’s turned away, gazing up the hill. Sam recognizes the look: absorbed, rapt. Listening. And hearing nothing.

“The battle goes on without us,” Dean says, and his voice is deeper than usual, abstracted, as if he’s quoting something.

“Another thing somebody once said?” asks Sam. “Who?”

There’s surprise in Dean’s face, and confusion. No anger, no pain; not yet.

“I think I did,” Dean says, a little wondering.

They sit watching the sun set over Lawrence. Nothing stirs until Sam puts the key in the ignition and turns on the headlights.

“Dean,” he says. “We can go on without the battle, too.” Dean looks at him but doesn’t speak. Sam shifts into drive, and starts moving them along.


End file.
